Inside the Simple Audit Process That Saved a Client Over £130,000 a Year
It’s easy to waste money on digital ads.
Google, Meta, and other platforms are designed to take your budget — not necessarily protect it. Without regular checks, even a well-built campaign can start bleeding money fast.
A while back, I was brought in to audit a campaign for a client spending over £8,000 a day on Google Ads. They were seeing results, but not nearly the return they expected — and they had no idea where their spend was going.
Within two weeks, I helped them eliminate £2,500/week in wasted spend, without reducing traffic or leads. In fact, the quality of their leads improved.
In this post, I’ll walk you through how I did it, and how you can apply the same thinking to your own campaigns — whether you’re spending £50/day or £5,000/day.
Step 1: Get the Right Data in Front of You
Before you can fix anything, you need to see what’s actually happening.
This client was running a mix of broad match and phrase match keywords, across multiple services. But their conversion tracking was unreliable — in some cases, they were counting page views as leads.
🛠️ What I did first:
- Audited and cleaned up their conversion tracking
- Segmented campaigns by service and region
- Built a performance dashboard using Google Looker Studio
🔍 Key Insight: They thought their “best” campaign had the highest ROI. Turns out, it just had the most spend — and almost half of it wasn’t converting at all.
If you can’t measure what’s working, you can’t improve it. Period.
Step 2: Isolate the High-Cost, Low-Quality Traffic
Next, I dove into the Search Terms Report — one of the most underused tools in Google Ads.
Here’s where it got ugly:
- They were bidding on terms like “insurance quote UK”
- But showing up for searches like “free insurance for students”, “become an insurance agent”, and “cheap pet insurance”
None of these matched their service offering — but they were paying for every click.
🧮 On average, those irrelevant clicks cost them £1,300–£1,500/week across campaigns.
🛠️ What I did:
- Identified the worst-performing search terms
- Built a negative keyword list (over 200 terms)
- Switched most ad groups to phrase match and exact match only
- Added audience exclusions to filter out irrelevant intent
💡 Pro Tip: Don’t just review your keywords — review the intent behind them. Google’s algorithm can get sloppy if you don’t give it boundaries.
Step 3: Tighten the Ad Copy
When I looked at the ad copy, most of it was too generic.
Phrases like:
- “Trusted provider of life insurance”
- “Apply now for a quote”
There was no unique angle, no urgency, and nothing to repel the wrong audience.
🛠️ What I changed:
- Rewrote ads to qualify the user
Example: “UK-Based Life Insurance for Over 50s – Apply in 5 Minutes” - Added location qualifiers in headlines
- Used real benefits (e.g., “Get Covered from £5/Month”, “Speak to a UK Agent Today”)
🎯 The result? Higher quality score, better click-through rate (CTR), and lower cost per lead within a week.
Step 4: Refine the Landing Pages
The campaign was sending traffic to a generic homepage or service page — not landing pages designed to convert.
These pages:
- Had multiple CTAs
- Weren’t mobile-friendly
- Didn’t reflect the ad message
🛠️ What we changed:
- Built dedicated landing pages for each campaign
- Added single focus CTAs
- Improved mobile load speed
- Inserted testimonials and urgency triggers (e.g., “Get Covered Today – Instant Quote”)
📉 This reduced bounce rate by 34% and increased conversion rate from 2.8% to 6.1% within four weeks.
Step 5: Restructure the Campaigns for Visibility
The original campaign setup lumped multiple services and audiences into one campaign — making it impossible to optimise or analyse properly.
🛠️ We restructured like this:
- One campaign per core service
- Branded terms separated into their own campaign
- Retargeting campaigns launched on both search and display
- Geographic targeting split by performance zones
Now we could clearly see:
- Which service drove the most leads
- Which region performed best
- Where to increase or decrease budget
💡 Visibility = control. If you can’t segment your data, you’re flying blind.
Step 6: Add Retargeting to Catch Lost Leads
One of the easiest wins was launching a retargeting campaign for people who had visited a landing page but didn’t convert.
Using Google Ads’ display network and YouTube, we created ads that:
- Re-engaged warm traffic
- Used testimonial and “trust-building” messaging
- Encouraged them to finish their application
🏁 This campaign ran at a fraction of the cost and recovered roughly 15–20 leads per week, which they previously lost.
Final Results After 8 Weeks
Here’s the impact of the audit and optimisation:
| Metric | Before Audit | After Audit |
| Weekly Ad Spend | £8,100 | £5,600 |
| Cost per Lead | £36.40 | £18.90 |
| Conversion Rate | 2.8% | 6.1% |
| Irrelevant Click Waste | ~£2,500/week | <£200/week |
| Lead Volume | ~220/week | ~295/week |
🎯 Annualised savings: over £130,000/year in unnecessary spend — with more leads and better ROI.
What This Means for You
You don’t need to be spending £8,000/day to have a waste problem. I’ve seen £1,000/month accounts wasting 40% of their spend — often because of the same reasons:
- Poor keyword control
- No negative keywords
- Generic ads
- Weak or mismatched landing pages
- No retargeting
- No real tracking or segmentation
💡 Whether you’re spending £30/day or £3,000/day, the principles are the same: clarity, relevance, and control.
Need a Second Set of Eyes?
If you’re not sure where your spend is going — or you know your campaigns aren’t performing the way they should — I offer a Free Google Ads Audit Call.
In 20 minutes, I’ll walk you through what’s leaking, what’s working, and where to focus next — no strings attached.